As former boss of the famed Texas Rangers, Henry “Hank” Whitman surely will know where to start as Gov. Greg Abbott’s recently appointed commissioner of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services: throw a whole bunch of people, including most of the Texas Legislature, the governor and the lieutenant governor into prison for knowingly and deliberately running a state-sponsored child rape factory.

Think that’s extreme? Then I know you have not read the decision in Stukenberg v. Abbott, which I have helpfully appended below. It’s the federal district court decision in a case brought against Texas in 2011 by a group of children who had been placed in the state’s foster care system.

AUSTIN (AP) – Gov. Greg Abbott has chosen the former head of the Texas Rangers as the new leader of the state’s embattled child welfare agency, calling the status quo there “unacceptable.”

Abbott tapped Henry “Hank” Whitman as Texas Department of Family and Protective Services commissioner. In a statement Monday, he said “our children are too important to suffer through the challenges they’ve faced.”

Whitman had nearly 35 years of law enforcement experience before retiring from the Rangers in 2012.

Dana Gibson had her 9-year-old daughter taken away from her by Texas Child Protective Services in October after she was found with drugs. Months later, Gibson has cleaned up — but she still can’t get custody of her daughter.“It’s very tough to talk about,” Gibson told WFAA-TV. “As a parent, there’s nothing worse than to know that you’ve caused your child pain.”Gibson said she recently received a “formal apology” from CPS, but it didn’t have anything to do with her getting her daughter back. Instead, it was an acknowledgement that the state agency had moved her daughter to a second foster home without the appropriate, prior notification.

Abused children in Texas are being left in psychiatric facilities longer than they were six years ago as the state’s child protective services system grapples with federal court scrutiny and diminishing options, according to data obtained by The Texas Tribune.

Last year, 17,151 Texas children were removed from abusive homes. While the agency could not say exactly how many were placed in private and state psychiatric hospitals, data from 2009 to 2015 shows roughly 4,000 psychiatric admissions for foster care children each year.

But the number of total days foster care children together spend in psychiatric facilities past their initial 8 to 10 days of treatment covered under Medicaid has risen. In June 2009, children taken together spent a total of 10 extra days in the facilities. By August 2015 that number had grown to 768 days.

“I can say the capacity issue is part of the problem,” said Julie Moody, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, which oversees the foster care program. That capacity issue has been complicated by the agency’s recent court loss, and in greater restrictions placed on relatives of abused children who are allowed to care for a child when the parents cannot.

When it comes to protecting children, Greg Abbott just doesn’t get it.

According to emails obtained by the Texas Tribune, Abbott took a personal interest in the January 2015 murder of a two-month old girl who had been removed from her mother by Child Protective Services and placed temporarily with a family friend. Justice Hull was drowned in a bowl of water by the family friend’s 14-year-old daughter, who told authorities she didn’t want her mom to adopt the child.

“In the days following the infant’s death, Abbott’s aides sent dozens of emails to executives at the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services,” the Trib reported, “seeking to understand how Child Protective Services had allowed Hull to live in a home where she would be murdered, and trying to determine how many other children might be at risk.”

Hull was just one of three CPS-related deaths in as many months. The Trib also reported that Abbott emailed department officials after the accidental shooting death of four-year-old Codrick McCall, and the death of three-year-old Audrey Torres, killed in a car accident caused by her drunk-driving dad.

It’s been a turbulent year for the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS). First there was the December court order by a federal judge in Corpus Christi – a sweeping and scathing order condemning what she called a “broken” foster care system, declaring it in violation of the Constitution and demanding a complete overhaul with a special master to be appointed to recommend fixes.

The state of Texas lost two intermediate battles Monday in its fight to block a federal judge’s efforts to reform a foster care system that she found has violated children’s civil rights by subjecting them to rampant neglect and abuse.

A higher court rejected Attorney GeneralKen Paxton‘s request to stop the appointment of “special masters” by U.S. District Judge Janis Jack of Corpus Christi to oversee reforms.

Jack quickly appointed two mastersfavored by children’s rights advocates: Francis McGovern, a Duke University law professor, and Kevin Ryan, partner at the New Jersey nonprofit Public Catalyst, which advocates for child welfare. Jack rejected candidates nominated by the state.

The masters are expected to study the system and recommend changes, such as hiring morecaseworkers to work with foster children and heightened oversight of foster group homes.

“This is a tremendous day for thousands of children in Texas state foster care,” said Paul Yetter, the lead attorney for long-term foster children and their advocates who brought the lawsuit that prompted Jack’s ruling.“After years of unsuccessful attempts to address the failings of an undeniably broken system, meaningful reform can finally take root.”

In December, Jack issued a sweeping ruling against Texas’ long-term foster care system, known as permanent managing conservatorship, finding that childrenin the system had been subjected to “years of abuse [and] neglect,” systemically denying them their civil rights.

Yetter’s team represents roughly 12,000 children in Texas’ long-term foster care system in the class-action suit known as M.D. v. Abbott. Paxton is expected to continue challenging the ruling in higher court.

Monday’s developments marked the latest in a series of blows to state officials, who have called Jack’s original ruling a “misguided federal takeover of the Texas foster-care system” that could mandate costly policies.

Ryan and McGovern will begin work as special masters on April 1, according to Children’s Rights, Inc., a nonprofit that helped bring the lawsuit against Texas.

On Monday, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals appeared to offer support for the ruling, saying it had found “evidence supporting the grave problems arising from the lack of 24-hour supervision in foster group homes.”

Widespread abuse stemming from unsupervised foster group homes was just one of many issues brought by lawyers suing the state, but it was the only one the appeals court alluded to when allowing Jack to appoint the special masters, at Texas’ expense.

A spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office did not immediately return a request for comment on the ruling.

Texas officials are fighting tooth and nail against court-ordered, potentially costly reforms to the state’s foster care system — a position that’s drawn fierce criticism from child welfare advocates.

Now a new group has joined the chorus lambasting the state for resisting those reforms: its own employees who work with children in foster care.

Current and retired Child Protective Services caseworkers gathered at the Capitol on Wednesday, urging Texas leaders to call off their appeal of a federal district judge’s ruling that would require Texas to hire more employees who keep track of children in long-term foster care.

Caseworkers say they are dangerously overburdened by the state, having to keep tabs on more children than they are physically able to.

In December, a federal judge’s scathing ruling laid out the legal and moral case that Texas leaders must vastly improve the state’s foster care system to ensure children’s lives get better — not worse — when Child Protective Services removes them from unsafe homes.

The ruling, which the state has appealed, comes as state leaders increasingly agree that foster care needs attention. Legislators have passed meaningful bills in recent sessions, and both Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Joe Straus have called on legislative committees to recommend steps to improve foster care prior.

Twenty years ago, when the foster care system in Illinois was at its worst, with 50,000 children trapped in foster care, an advocate in that state said the system had become “like a laboratory experiment to produce the sexual abuse of children.”

Now, with about 17,000 children in foster care, independent monitors say the Illinois system is much improved, though much remains to be done.

But the laboratory didn’t close — it just moved south. A court decision released last December is a guided tour through the hellscape that is foster care in Texas. It chronicles abuse in foster care that isn’t just common, it’s rampant. And it documents how the state turned a blind eye to suffering on a massive scale.

WHISTLEBLOWERS WANTED

CCHR is looking for anyone who knows of incidents of fraudulent prescribing, failure to follow Texas drugging guidelines for children or who has knowledge of illegal referral fees or kickbacks in the drugging of Medicaid children to come forward.

This includes knowledgeable employees of DFPS and HHSC, staff of any local office or clinic, any contractor, foster parent or citizen with knowledge.

Please use the short form below to get in touch with us and someone from our office will contact you. Your information is held in the strictest confidence.

Texas Psychiatry News

Abused children in Texas are being left in psychiatric facilities longer than they were six years ago as the state’s child protective services system grapples with federal court scrutiny and diminishing options, according to data obtained by The Texas Tribune. Last year, 17,151 Texas children were removed from abusive homes. While the agency could not say exactly how […]

Houston police found the 16-year-old foster child in a park in early November 2013, just a few days after she ran away from a residential treatment center in northwest Houston. Rosario, a baby-faced, black-haired girl who carried a little extra weight, said she’d been selling her body for money. The cops returned her to the […]